4 Months’ stark take on illegal abortion in pre-revolution Romania has won the 40-year-old Mungiu wide acclaim — and he’s only just begun.

You say this film is part of a proposed trilogy. How do you see that unfolding? It will involve younger Romanian directors as well as me, maybe six episodes and two more features. But we will see!

It’s hard not to wonder how personal this movie is for you… This is a true story that happened pretty much as you see in the film, to someone who was very close to me. I was struck by how much emotion, how much frustration came with this conversation, and I thought, if this is so characteristic of our generation, this should become a film. And after a lot of screenings, there were so many women in the audience just standing up and speaking openly about this for the first time, and we found out this was actually a very widespread story.

It’s a pretty difficult movie to shake off. This is how films should be, for me. They should stay with you, because it is useless to spend two years of your life making something people will forget five minutes after they stand up, you know?